Born to Read Website (Deadline: Ongoing)

Please visit the new-and-improved BTR Website, which the wonderful Laura Schulte-Cooper has just updated for us to coincide with our latest CAL article, "Beyond the Brochure: Promoting Early Literacy Through Born to Read."

When Laura updated the BTR Website with our new content, she suggested we consider ways for our ALSC colleagues to submit their own ideas to share under topics such as "Outreach to Expectant/New Parents" and "Storytime Ideas." This would be a great way for us to keep the Website fresh and relevant, especially since we know there are great things happening at libraries across the country!

Laura thought we might consider creating a gmail account for folks to use when submitting their ideas to us. The account could be managed by the chairperson, who would pass along the password to the next chairperson as leadership changes from year to year.

What do you think about this idea? Are there other suggestions you have for managing submissions and/or keeping the Website current with our colleagues' ideas? Let's hear from you!

It is a fairly sparse site, although easy to use. It seems…I don’t know…a bit lacking. A topic that include “outreach” activities or a link to a list of those would be nice. For instance, Bringing books to doctor’s offices, hospitals, etc. Baby times at Headstarts and so forth. I have other ideas but I wanted to get the conversation started a bit before I launched in J

Emily, thank you for sharing your feedback on the BTR Website and getting this conversation started! You've brought up some really great points. I agree there are definitely areas for us to improve, supplement, and develop. Though we've built the site up considerably since it was first launched, we really are at the beginning stages here.

When I submitted the new Website content to Laura Schulte-Cooper back in August, she also noted the sparse areas and suggested we create a gmail account for ALSC members to use in submitting new ideas for the site. I'm planning to do that in the next few days, and I'll share the address with you once I've done so.

Emily, you've got some great ideas. Would you be willing to coordinate the BTR Website effort for our committee? I'd like at least two other members to help Emily look at what we've got and recommend/generate additional content.

Since Matt and I already have our hands full with the best practice survey and the hot topic/Webinar project, I think we'll sit this one out for now. Roxanne, Jennifer, Saroj, Bina, or Susan? Any takers?

Thanks in advance, everyone! I look forward to hearing how we can make the BTR Website as rich as possible for our fellow ALSC members.

I'd be happy to help Emily, although I admit that my creative ideas well is a bit dry at the moment. I wonder if a blog - which would have searchable posts - might be useful? I agree the site is a bit sparse, but I'd like to think carefully about how submitted ideas would be organized.

Thank you, Jennifer and Roxanne, for offering to team up with Emily on evaluating the BTR Website and suggesting new strategies for keeping it fresh and focused. I know there's work to be done, but there's some great material there already. I hope it serves as a solid starting point for you!

As the three of you work together on this, please be sure to keep the rest of the committee posted on your ideas and discussions through regular posts to ALA Connect. (Jennifer, I think you mentioned starting a blog to generate ideas. Let me look into that and see if that's something we can pursue as an ALSC committee.)

Thanks in advance for your efforts, Emily, Jennifer, and Roxanne! I appreciate your willingness to take on this project.

We just had our youth services committee meeting for our consortium (a whopping 10 people showed up, which is great turnout for all our tiny, under-staffed libraries!) and Tessa Michaelson Schmidt, the new youth services coordinator for Wisconsin, said they are working on a comprehensive brochure (with online components) for the state. I wonder if other states have similar resources and we could somehow gather them together, making this website a sort of central resource?

I think this is a great idea. It would be great if we could compile similar resources and have them all in one location. I'm not sure the best way to go about finding out which, or how many, other states have something like this but I'd be happy to start looking into it if we choose to take this idea further.

With the best practice survey launch coming up quickly (next Tuesday, 11/6 is the big day!), I thought we could revisit the BTR Website and think about all the ways we can make it awesome (as well as useful and relevant, of course).

Jennifer, Roxanne, and Emily, you've all volunteered to work on ideas for ways we can improve existing resources. What have the three of you discussed so far?

Here are some points of consideration I thought we could use as additional starting points:

What aspects of the current content can we further develop/expand?

What content can we add? Is there anything we should delete?

Will we be soliciting feedback from ALSC members about what they'd like to see added? If so, how will we go about that? (One suggestion was to use the ECPS Committee e-mail account, alsc.ecps@gmail.com, and compile responses in a shared Google docs file.)

Ultimately, we want to create the richest, most useful Website we can for our fellow ALSC members. As we outlined in our most recent Children and Libraries article, the site can be a great complement to the work folks are already doing with Every Child Ready to Read.

I don't think there's anything I would delete, but we could certainly add to it and make sure everything is up to date. I also think we definitely want to get feedback from ALSC members, although I'm not sure the best way to go about that.